Ben Feder > Quotes

“You back already?” Seymour asked. “Where’d the time go?” Sabbatical, I realized, was an exercise in relativity. Our new experiences and the emotions attached to them created new memories and changed our characters. Time had passed slowly for me and my family. It was so thick and heavy we could nearly grip it. But for my professional colleagues who were engaged in the daily routines of work and home, their more linear stretch of time marched ahead briskly like soldiers on parade. Routine made their lives easier—they didn’t have to think about or choose what to do next. Habit took over, hiding the passage of time and draining it from awareness.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“May you experience peace and well-being. May you be protected and free from harm. May you have peace of mind.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“Being progressive and creative may be necessary, but I didn’t think it was sufficient. And the value of being an educated individual lay far beyond acquiring any technical or creative skill.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“I connected to critical relationships in my life. I recognized that the basic needs, drives, and desires of people were all the same: they wanted to suffer less and enjoy more. I was grateful for what I had and didn’t want more.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“Eric asked, “How are you feeling about going back to work?” “I don’t know. I don’t think about it much, but when I do, the thing I’m curious about is how to keep this sense of peace while competing in the world. I wonder if I’ll have lost my edge or somehow gotten weak.” Eric’s response was quick. “You’ve taken a giant step. You’ve assumed responsibility for the course of your life. You’re not clinging to habits to secure your sense of self. That’s strength, not weakness. That’s big, big strength.” He was complimenting me, but as if from a higher plane of wisdom.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“The experience reminded me of the first time I picked up a pencil to draw. To change perspective was to change perception.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“I felt the urge to scratch an itch on my right cheek. I didn’t react. My neural system didn’t necessarily work the way I’d been taught in school—that, in an infinitesimal instant, a neural message traveled from my cheek to my brain (itch), then from my brain to my hand (scratch). I knew now that between those two steps, the brain processed the information. There was room for the brain to fill in or to make things up entirely. By slowing down the process through meditation, by creating space, I could catch the impulse, slow it down, and quiet it. Instead of reaching for my cheek, I responded to the sensation by noting it and then focusing the laser beam of my attention on it. Magically, that simple act of bringing the itch from the periphery of my awareness to center stage melted the urge away. I returned my attention to my breath. I sat, surrendered in perfect stillness, feeling strength in the silence.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“The interpretations of that model were wildly different from one artist to the next. They reaffirmed the idea that expression is unique to each individual and that raw information, in art and elsewhere, is much less interesting than the interpretation and insights derived from it.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“Through meditation and other practices, he consciously set about to develop neural connections that promoted positive emotions, personal relationships, and a sense of abundance in his life. His mantra was notice, shift, rewire. First, notice negative thoughts as they occur, then shift them into something more positive to rewire synaptic connections. He meant that through meditation and by deliberately shifting thoughts from negative to positive, a sense of joy could be permanently etched into the brain. “Happiness is a teachable mental skill. It’s a matter of training your brain,” he said. “It’s an inside job.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“I have struggled to let go of my ego, my sense of self being at the center of things. Why do we continuously attempt to fill our lives only with those things that we like and banish those that we don’t? It’s as if we stamp experience with ‘like’ and ‘don’t like’ icons. Thumbs up, thumbs down.” It all seemed like an endless path with no possible destination. I tried to let go, at least for a while, of my burning desire to succeed and realized that I didn’t need more than I already had and that I could accept or deal with whatever came my way.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“I needed to do the hard work of changing the wiring of my mind, of noticing when I felt like a failure and shifting my thoughts, if only slightly, to construct a different narrative, one that included a sense of growth, discovery, and new experience.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“Remember your twenty-four-hour rule,” she said in a level-headed way that I knew hid her own nervousness. Whenever I got some phone call or email that felt like someone had just dropped a steaming problem in my lap and made me feel exposed, before I reacted or tried to find a solution, I gave the situation twenty-four hours to percolate. Better yet, I tried to find a distraction. Somehow, solutions always presented themselves as my unconscious mind worked the problem. We turned off”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“the best way to resolve complex situations is to find a distraction, something else to focus on.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“When I reframed the situation in positive terms and emotions, the vector and tone of the conversation changed. What could have been ugly became amicable. Instead of fighting the force that was coming at me, I witnessed its momentum and flowed with it. I observed events as they transpired and responded instead of reacted.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“The night before, Leo and I had attended a screening of the movie Happy at an expat community event. His example reminded me that the lessons from that film—that happiness is derived from pursuing intrinsic values, like love, gratitude, and courage, which connect us to one another—were first articulated thousands of years ago by Aristotle, who did not consider power, status, and money to be intrinsically valuable.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“With each success, your brain gets a dopamine hit. You begin to crave it and find yourself just wanting more. But it’s never enough. And anyway, it’s a sugar high. It doesn’t last.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“Yoga transitions were a metaphor for other areas of my life. Sabbatical was a personal and professional change for me, but I could recognize that it was only a temporary condition, perhaps only a transition. It was easy to mistake it for something more permanent, but the lesson from yoga was clear: stay too long in transitions and the sense of grounding vanishes; hurry through transitions and the opportunity to set up a strong next position is lost.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“As in any relationship, once I learned to trust, my bike delivered, and I became stronger. I felt I’d broken through some barrier and left something behind. It was a soaring emotion.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“I stood at the top of my mat and listened to Nikki’s instructions to set an intention. When yoga teachers instructed me to set an intention, I had once struggled with the concept. I had no idea what they had meant. But now I understood. Intention was doing something deliberately so that it has meaning. Intention was what was missing in Malcolm Gladwell’s well-known ten-thousand-hour rule that many hours of practice were required to achieve excellence. It was the intention to improve while putting in those hours that was crucially important. Just showing up didn’t do it.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“Inquiry was a meditation of sorts; thoughts, not circumstances, had the power to inflict suffering. The sense of dissatisfaction was an illusion of the mind. Like meditation, the first step to overcoming negative thoughts was being conscious of them, to see them the way a meditator sees them and witness them from afar.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“Metta, or loving-kindness meditation, was a foundational practice of Buddhism used to cultivate benevolence by imagining altruism and locking it with silent phrase repetition. I started a bit like other meditation, by sitting and bringing awareness to the breath: the inhale, the exhale, and the negative spaces between them. I was now able to shift quickly into awareness. The”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“I was getting tired of the endless striving, the ambition, and the desire for more.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“Much of what I’d pursued in my career and personal life was about trying to shape my world into how I thought things should be instead of accepting things as they were.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“As for losing your edge,” Eric said, “I think that warrants a little inquiry practice.” “What’s that?” “Most people actually believe their own thoughts. But thoughts are not facts. They’re just thoughts. They don’t necessarily reflect reality. Whenever you hear your inner voice saying, ‘I haven’t achieved enough,’ or ‘I don’t have what it takes,’ or whatever—and we all have that inner voice—ask yourself this: ‘Is it true?’ We’re all attached to our stories, but it’s worth asking coldly, ‘What evidence do you have to prove beyond doubt that it’s true?’” He suggested I ruthlessly apply the Socratic method to the judgmental opinions of my own mind. “If you can’t find that evidence—because guess what? Most of the time it doesn’t exist—then imagine how you’d feel if you told yourself a different story or simply envisioned yourself without that self-critical thought.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“In yoga, balance derives from the proper placement of limbs, head, and torso in relation to each other. In art, balance suggests itself when color, shape, and line are composed in a way that defines a work. In business, balance requires all elements of an enterprise to dovetail to create a competitive edge.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“I’ve advised some terrific executives,” she said, “guys who go from one great job to an even better one. They’re constantly achieving and rising. Do you know what happens to those people?” “Tell me.” “They drop dead of a heart attack at fifty-five.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“I thought of metta meditation, which cultivates compassion by imagining sending kindness to others with each exhale and receiving their suffering with each inhale. Compassion was a core Buddhist ethic that began with compassion for the self and ended with compassion for all sentient beings. I closed my eyes, took in a deep breath as I thought about those workers, and exhaled slowly. It was a strange response for me, someone who would ordinarily think about concrete ways to help or otherwise take action. There was little I really could do. Yet I recognized the benefit of cultivating compassion in my own mind in the face of their suffering and the harm to me if I were to be as indifferent as a mountain to their suffering. I also tried to instill compassion in my children, some of whose friends—and ours—seemed to take for granted their windfall into privilege. I took in another deep breath. Then another. And another.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“They saw some of the ugliness that war brings to civilians, and they saw extreme need. They could not help but be affected by it. When I asked Oliver what made the strongest impression on him, he said, “The poverty.” Our children had the opportunity to see their own country from the outside looking in.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back

“Sabbatical, I realized, was an exercise in relativity. Our new experiences and the emotions attached to them created new memories and changed our characters. Time had passed slowly for me and my family. It was so thick and heavy we could nearly grip it. But for my professional colleagues who were engaged in the daily routines of work and home, their more linear stretch of time marched ahead briskly like soldiers on parade. Routine made their lives easier—they didn’t have to think about or choose what to do next. Habit took over, hiding the passage of time and draining it from awareness.”
― Ben Feder, Take Off Your Shoes: One Man's Journey from the Boardroom to Bali and Back